In a further update to the problems with the last batch of DVD's from Bandai, they have informed us today that (as expected) they would like to handle the customer exchanges.
If you are a US or Canadian customer and are experiencing play problems with one of the following:
Eureka Seven, Vol #11 DVD
Flag, Vol #2 DVD
My-Otome, Vol #4 DVD
Gundam Seed Destiny, Vol #12 DVD
Gundam Seed Destiny, Vol #12 DVD Limited Edition
Please contact Bandai directly using their customer service form here for an exchange of the defective DVD(s).
If you had already setup a replacement ticket with us, Bandai requests that you still go ahead and contact them directly for the exchange.
If you are an international customer then please sit tight and we'll handle the replacement for you directly. We ask your patience in this matter as we are going to have to wait for a new batch of disks from Bandai and we will need to test them inhouse before doing any overseas exchanges. I imagine this will take a few weeks.
For the record, no, I'm not too happy with this. I know they will be slow in taking care of these exchanges. Also, Bandai wants us to continue to ship these DVD's to customers, and then handle any issues directly on a case by case basis. I would have preferred that the DVD's all get recalled and new (corrected) DVD's issued out to retailers, but that's not what they wanted to do and the powers that be have spoken.
Due to the high defect rate reported in GSD #12 we are going to continue to hold new shipments of the individual version until we are at least able to get a new (and hopefully corrected) batch of the discs from Bandai.
The hot new entertainment trend for 1977 - "Anime"!
J'ever notice the continual parade of new anime fans who have the idea that Japanese cartoons are some brand new thing that only recently impacted American pop culture? Because if THEY just found out about it, it HAS to be some hot new trend! Right? Wrong. As evidence to the contrary allow me to present... Cool Robot Toys of The 1970's, namely, Shogun Warriors.
In the post-Star Wars toy world everybody scrambled to find science-fictiony properties for America's toy-hungry children. Some bright executive at Mattel must have, I dunno, gone to Japan or something, because the mid 1970s reaped a bountiful harvest of brightly colored metal and plastic spaceships, heroes, robots, vehicles, and unidentifiable THINGS to amuse Japanese children. The idea of shipping these things across the ocean for American kids is not a complex one; Japan had been supplying toys and cutesy ceramics for years (not to mention radios, motorbikes, cars, etc) to their roundeyed cousins.
As one of those American 70s kids, I found the impact of Shogun Warriors to be swift and powerful. We couldn't tell Great Mazinger from the Great Pumpkin, but boy, we knew cool toys when we saw them. The giant two-foot plastic robots shot their fists across the room, the smaller diecast robots shot their fists and transformed and raised a big bruise if you hit somebody with them, and all of these toys simply looked fantastic - this was a level of creativity and design in children's toys not seen since the mid 60s, if even then.
Most of the toys came from various Toei robot anime series - Getta Robo G, Raideen, Great Mazinger, Danguard Ace, Gaiking, Daimos. Some toys were culled from the outlandish vehicles seen in Toei's live-action "sentai" programs like Gorangers or Message From Space. But we didn't care then. We would care later. Later Jim Terry would use the popularity of Shogun Warriors as an impetus to produce a package of episodes of 5 different Toei animated SF series under the title "Force Five". Showtime cable would air compilation films and they just cut to the chase and titled them "Shogun Warriors." I bet Mattel was pissed.
Plenty of ancillary merchandise like coloring books and puzzles produced a Shogun Warriors experience un-marred by any actual context. Mattel took the Japan theme one step further by producing giant plastic fist-shooting toys of Godzilla and Rodan just for the American market. Marvel Comics even produced a licensed title based on some of the robot designs, treating Americans to the spectacle of Herb Trimpe illustrating robots originally drawn by Leiji Matsumoto and Yoshikazu Yasuhiko.
Nowadays Japanese robot toys are valuable collectors items. The reissues of the giant two-foot fist-shooting robot are much too expensive to allow seven-year-olds to have their way with them, and toys that shoot tiny missiles might as well have giant labels that say WILL POKE YOUR EYES OUT. But for a brief shining moment in the mid 70s, American and Japanese children were united in brightly colored die-cast plastic Japanese cartoon play-value.
In the post-Star Wars toy world everybody scrambled to find science-fictiony properties for America's toy-hungry children. Some bright executive at Mattel must have, I dunno, gone to Japan or something, because the mid 1970s reaped a bountiful harvest of brightly colored metal and plastic spaceships, heroes, robots, vehicles, and unidentifiable THINGS to amuse Japanese children. The idea of shipping these things across the ocean for American kids is not a complex one; Japan had been supplying toys and cutesy ceramics for years (not to mention radios, motorbikes, cars, etc) to their roundeyed cousins.
As one of those American 70s kids, I found the impact of Shogun Warriors to be swift and powerful. We couldn't tell Great Mazinger from the Great Pumpkin, but boy, we knew cool toys when we saw them. The giant two-foot plastic robots shot their fists across the room, the smaller diecast robots shot their fists and transformed and raised a big bruise if you hit somebody with them, and all of these toys simply looked fantastic - this was a level of creativity and design in children's toys not seen since the mid 60s, if even then.
Most of the toys came from various Toei robot anime series - Getta Robo G, Raideen, Great Mazinger, Danguard Ace, Gaiking, Daimos. Some toys were culled from the outlandish vehicles seen in Toei's live-action "sentai" programs like Gorangers or Message From Space. But we didn't care then. We would care later. Later Jim Terry would use the popularity of Shogun Warriors as an impetus to produce a package of episodes of 5 different Toei animated SF series under the title "Force Five". Showtime cable would air compilation films and they just cut to the chase and titled them "Shogun Warriors." I bet Mattel was pissed.
Plenty of ancillary merchandise like coloring books and puzzles produced a Shogun Warriors experience un-marred by any actual context. Mattel took the Japan theme one step further by producing giant plastic fist-shooting toys of Godzilla and Rodan just for the American market. Marvel Comics even produced a licensed title based on some of the robot designs, treating Americans to the spectacle of Herb Trimpe illustrating robots originally drawn by Leiji Matsumoto and Yoshikazu Yasuhiko.
Nowadays Japanese robot toys are valuable collectors items. The reissues of the giant two-foot fist-shooting robot are much too expensive to allow seven-year-olds to have their way with them, and toys that shoot tiny missiles might as well have giant labels that say WILL POKE YOUR EYES OUT. But for a brief shining moment in the mid 70s, American and Japanese children were united in brightly colored die-cast plastic Japanese cartoon play-value.
More Bad from Bandai
There has been a lot of forum discussion over the long weekend regarding playback problems in the last batch of Bandai releases. I'm sorry to say that it's just about all true, and we came back from the holiday weekend today to deal with an inbox full of defective DVD reports, and since we were able to ship these titles a couple weeks prior to the street date, we're one of the first retailers to see and have to deal with the unhappy fans who have bad disks.
So here's what we know so far and see from our customer report data:
Disks effected:
Flag, Vol #2 DVD (some reports)
My-Otome, Vol #4 DVD (few reports)
Gundam Seed Destiny, Vol #12 DVD (many reports)
Gundam Seed Destiny, Vol #12 DVD Limited Edition (many reports)
We've already shipped approx 700 of these DVD's combined, the majority being GSD #12. We've received reports of various payback issues with My Otome #4. In the instances of problems with the Flag #2 the disk typically will not play at all (unreadable). For GSD #12 (the regular and limited version come with the same DVD), most customers are reporting that Eps #50 will not play, and in some cases the extra's will not play either.
The problems seem to be with the disk encoding. The problems are widespread (over 20% of total) but do not effect all the disks and, in fact, just as many customers have reported that their disks are playing perfectly, so perhaps the issues are systemic of certain types of players. Of the approx 700 disks we've shipped and have been out for at least a week we've received approx 80 complaints of play problems so far, and most of those are being reported by either Flag or GSD 12 customers. From this data I'm gathering that the defects are being experienced in 10-25% of the discs in each lot, and are concentrated in the GSD 12 DVD's.
Bandai has not yet made any official statements regarding this yet, but out the backdoor they have told me that they are still gathering data and will not make any announcements regarding these problems until at least January 8th which is the official street dates of all these DVD's.
The problems are widespread enough that it's likely Bandai will put forward a direct replacement program. Since the problems are only effecting a portion of the DVD's, we are still shipping these titles (as of today), however, we are not going to ship out anymore replacement disks until we hear the official word from Bandai next week.
For US customers you are still OK to order these, the chances are in your favor that the disks you receive will play fine. If they don't, just contact us and we'll setup a replacement ticket and hold it until we hear from Bandai as to what their procedure will be. We'll make sure one way or another that customers that are having trouble get good disks. I recommend International customers hold off ordering these for a couple of weeks until we know more about the issues. If you are an overseas customer and already have a bad disk just let us know and we'll act as your agent to get you replacement DVD's.
For the record, this will be the third GSD DVD of the twelve that has come from Bandai with some sort of encoding problem in the first batch. It really is time for Bandai to fire their replicator and hire a contractor that has some decent quality control. These types of problems are getting too common in their releases, and if they continue fans will become more reluctant to buy their DVD's - and then we'll have another 'Geneon' fiasco on our hands...
As always, E-Mail me with questions.
UPDATE (1/7/08): Our defective reported ratios for the GSD 12 DVD's has reached 50%, so we are suspending shipments of the individual DVD until we can get replacement stock from Bandai. All new orders will be placed on back order until we have good stock. Thank you in advance for your patience regarding this.
So here's what we know so far and see from our customer report data:
Disks effected:
Flag, Vol #2 DVD (some reports)
My-Otome, Vol #4 DVD (few reports)
Gundam Seed Destiny, Vol #12 DVD (many reports)
Gundam Seed Destiny, Vol #12 DVD Limited Edition (many reports)
We've already shipped approx 700 of these DVD's combined, the majority being GSD #12. We've received reports of various payback issues with My Otome #4. In the instances of problems with the Flag #2 the disk typically will not play at all (unreadable). For GSD #12 (the regular and limited version come with the same DVD), most customers are reporting that Eps #50 will not play, and in some cases the extra's will not play either.
The problems seem to be with the disk encoding. The problems are widespread (over 20% of total) but do not effect all the disks and, in fact, just as many customers have reported that their disks are playing perfectly, so perhaps the issues are systemic of certain types of players. Of the approx 700 disks we've shipped and have been out for at least a week we've received approx 80 complaints of play problems so far, and most of those are being reported by either Flag or GSD 12 customers. From this data I'm gathering that the defects are being experienced in 10-25% of the discs in each lot, and are concentrated in the GSD 12 DVD's.
Bandai has not yet made any official statements regarding this yet, but out the backdoor they have told me that they are still gathering data and will not make any announcements regarding these problems until at least January 8th which is the official street dates of all these DVD's.
The problems are widespread enough that it's likely Bandai will put forward a direct replacement program. Since the problems are only effecting a portion of the DVD's, we are still shipping these titles (as of today), however, we are not going to ship out anymore replacement disks until we hear the official word from Bandai next week.
For US customers you are still OK to order these, the chances are in your favor that the disks you receive will play fine. If they don't, just contact us and we'll setup a replacement ticket and hold it until we hear from Bandai as to what their procedure will be. We'll make sure one way or another that customers that are having trouble get good disks. I recommend International customers hold off ordering these for a couple of weeks until we know more about the issues. If you are an overseas customer and already have a bad disk just let us know and we'll act as your agent to get you replacement DVD's.
For the record, this will be the third GSD DVD of the twelve that has come from Bandai with some sort of encoding problem in the first batch. It really is time for Bandai to fire their replicator and hire a contractor that has some decent quality control. These types of problems are getting too common in their releases, and if they continue fans will become more reluctant to buy their DVD's - and then we'll have another 'Geneon' fiasco on our hands...
As always, E-Mail me with questions.
UPDATE (1/7/08): Our defective reported ratios for the GSD 12 DVD's has reached 50%, so we are suspending shipments of the individual DVD until we can get replacement stock from Bandai. All new orders will be placed on back order until we have good stock. Thank you in advance for your patience regarding this.
Bleach Flash Game - Dress up Ichigo
You can change the background music by clicking button 1, 2, 3. To find out more, try playing the game. You can even print screen and show us your Ichigo picture. We would definitely love to see how you dress up Ichigo.
Saw this awesome game from yoshimotoeugene and i immediately asked for his permission to put the game here.
Ichigo Dress up game
Click HERE if you want to play the bigger version
Click "Read More" to find out more about the game
Click HERE if you want to play the bigger version
Click "Read More" to find out more about the game
Saw this awesome game from yoshimotoeugene and i immediately asked for his permission to put the game here.
Happy New Year!
We find ourselves passing our 10th year serving Anime fans and entering our 11th. Wow! Who would have thought in 1997 we'd be running one of the largest online Anime stores in the country.As we enter 2008, Downloading and bootlegging continues to destroy the industry as studios are forced to downsize or close, and the best creative talent is lost to more profitable and rewarding endeavours. How's the US Anime industry doing right now? About 'Average'. That is to say that today is worse than yesterday, but probably better than tomorrow, at least short term.
I'm satisfied with our results for the past year, even though the fourth quarter was weaker than we had expected, mostly due to the loss of Geneon's entire product line. We have not seen the sort of massive sales shortfalls that the mass market retailers have reported, but that's because we have always catered to the core Anime fan whos interest remains strong. We've never really cared much what box movers like Best Buy does, but sales shortfalls in those areas do effect the studios that have come to rely on those tenuous sales channels far too heavily. 2007 was a very challenging year for the Anime industry as a whole, and we'll continue to change and adapt as necessary in the coming months. You might see new product lines become available on the store while other lines may be reduced or phased out. We're also deciding if it's finally time to change the Store around and add more 'commercial' style elements and features to the shopping experience. I'm still not a big fan of that, but ultimately it will depend on what you guys tell us you want.
Whatever happens, we'll be here for another year continuing to help all of you enjoy the Genre as much as we do. As Farragut said - "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!"
Here's to a prosperous 2008 for all of us. Happy New Year everyone!
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